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One afternoon in January, the pine forest had been brought indoors at the Wilks Branch Library in Brooklawn Park. Displays of twigs, stems, and pinecones lined a table. Conifer trunks, sliced to reveal growth rings and sanded to silken smoothness, invited touch.
David Canizales, Mobile Adventures manager for the Trustees of Reservations, and outdoor educator Katie Angle were on hand to teach drop-in visitors, young and old, about evergreens.
The mission of Mobile Adventures, based at the Allen C. Haskell Public Gardens, is “expanding access to nature through play and exploration” by offering pop-up activities at parks, festivals, museums and other community centers in New Bedford and Fall River. Recently, it has offered programs on animal tracking at the Fall River Public Library and weather exploration at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park.
A van — electric, of course — is stocked with materials for coastal explorations, forest or geology investigations, fort-building, and creating art from natural objects. The Yawkey Foundation provided the van and funds to support Mobile Adventures’ work with urban youth on the South Coast.
Canizales joined the Trustees as a part-time outdoor educator last May and was promoted to mobile engagement manager in September. Angle, along with Gillian Simmons, MD, FAAP, is seasonal part-time staff. In summer, the seasonal staff expands to four.
Canizales, a Fall River native, has substantial experience working with youth, having been program director at the Boys & Girls Club of Fall River and residential counselor for Saint Vincent’s Services.
He is working towards an associate of science degree in biology at Bristol Community College. Earlier, he studied history and philosophy at Bridgewater State University.
He spoke with The Light about the program that aims to serve urban youth, how he hopes they benefit, and how his own love of the outdoors was sparked.
New Bedford Light: When was the Mobile Adventures program introduced?
David Canizales: This is the third year Mobile Adventures has been around. The first was a bit of a pilot, and the last two years we’ve been going full steam as a seasonal program during the summers. But this is the first year that we’ve extended the program to be year-round.
We have a weekly partnership with the New Bedford Boys and Girls Club right now. We go there every Friday and do different topics, for example, on bugs (gesturing to paper wasp nests and other specimens on a table). We’ve been doing a deep dive.
We’re a little different than a lot of other Trustees programs. The Trustees has 120-plus properties around the state [with] lots of programming operating out of the actual sites. Mobile Adventures, along with the Boston Waterfront Initiative (a proposal to create a public park), we’re part of the urban outdoors, so we don’t have a specific property where we do the bulk of our programming. We’re hosted by all the different other partners that we’ve established in the area. We work primarily in Fall River, New Bedford, and we’re starting to go to Boston with some more regular frequency.
NBL: Do other urban areas in the commonwealth have similar Trustees of Reservations programs?
DC: We’ve looked to the future to see where there is community need. And, of course, Boston is the next biggest priority … We’re starting off with a couple of pre-K series in Boston, so that has been just a joy to be involved with in Roxbury and East Boston, during these sleepy winter months: to offer a service that you know no one else is really doing. …
The mission behind our work is to increase access [to nature] for kids in urban areas. We really want to foster a spark of curiosity and a vested interest in the outdoors. They say — what? — over 50 percent of everybody in the state of Massachusetts is going to be an urban resident in the next 20 years. So that’s where the people are. If you want to maintain and protect these places long-term, [it requires] getting the next generation invested.
NBL: What are some of the sites in New Bedford and Fall River that you go to?
DC: We work with the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. We go there for AHA! Nights. We’re a committed partner of AHA! … During the summer, in partnership with New Bedford Parks and Rec, we go out to different sites at city parks. [Last] summer, it was over at Ricketson Nature Center in Brooklawn Park. We’re also at PACE’s food bank, trying to increase access for people in the heart of the community.
We work with the Housing Authority in Fall River, Fall River Heritage State Park, the [Fall River] mayor’s office, which gets us connected to all the large community events across the city. …
In the off-season when we can’t really be doing things outside, as the program kind of was intended to, we find ourselves in the libraries. Fall River just has the one, but in New Bedford, we’ve been trying to cycle it so we’re at a different library every week.
NBL: Do you encounter many youngsters who have never, for example, been on a hiking trail or seen a live frog?
DC: Oh yeah, all the time. Every single time we come out we have things as a part of our program that kids have never had any kind of introduction to. Some of the greatest examples of that were when we were doing camping activities during the summer. We had week-long topics [for] all the different events that we were doing, [for example] going into public housing with the Housing Authority in Fall River, and bringing tents, sleeping bags, camping chairs … to let the kids really just go at it and explore with putting it together and having somebody there to help them kind of figure out [how to set up a campsite].
So many kids have never been camping before and also have no idea that they’re surrounded by nature. It’s something that’s close to my heart, being a Fall River resident. I’ve lived in the Flint my whole life. I’ve loved going to the Freetown [State] Forest and enjoying the Southeastern Massachusetts Bioreserve, mountain biking, and hiking. You try telling that to kids, and they don’t have any idea that Fall River is over 50 percent forest.
NBL: What was your experience of the outdoors when you were a kid?
DC: I was involved as a kid in Royal Rangers, which is a kind of a church-centered Boy Scouts. Plus I have a lot of outdoorsmen in my family that got me interested in it. It started out as hiking and camping, and then as I got older, it gave me the drive to go and travel and experience different ecosystems.
I developed a real love for national parks. I love traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard, checking out different places. I’ve done the entire Blue Ridge Parkway. I’ve hiked about half of the New Hampshire 48 (4,000 footers) in the White Mountains, and I’ve hit every high peak in the Northeast.
[The outdoor world] is something that I just kind of grew up around. I had the privilege of knowing that it was there. I don’t knock anybody, in Fall River, especially, who doesn’t even know that they have all these trails around them.
[When I was growing up] it was tough to find things to do that were free. But my dad had a car, and that let us go to places that I think a lot of people would consider kind of mundane, like local universities, libraries, and hiking trails. So going to Profile Rock and Freetown forest was a go-to for us. I was a little mountain goat going up and down those rock faces.
NBL: What do you hope to spark in children through Mobile Adventures?
DC: My number-one goal running Mobile Adventures and bringing our program out into the city is really just getting kids curious about the outdoors, and get them to know the different spaces around them that exist, whether those be city parks or a beautiful Trustees property like the Haskell Gardens, or like in Fall River, where we do a lot of activities at the Copicut Woods, or the Freetown State Forest. Just getting them introduced to the outdoors.
I think today the kids don’t have the same exposure that even my generation had not that long ago — with just being outside playing and going for a bike ride. I’ve worked with kids my entire adult life, and I can tell you from experience that kids are on electronics, they’re indoors, and it’s tough to get them to think that playing outside is even relevant.
Bringing our activities indoors, and outdoors in the city parks in summer, it’s trying to make being outside fun. We have a lot of competition. Video games are tough to replicate when you’re outside. But we have so many cool activities and natural materials that we bring out that the kids get hands-on and actually play with.
They start asking questions, like “What is this?” and “Where does this come from?” We have animal specimens and plants that are from here and from different parts of the world. It just kind of gets the creative juices flowing, the kids asking those questions.
And from there, we help guide kids and their families [to] where they can go. I think a lot of people are surprised that so many places nearby are both accessible and free. We’re surrounded by beautiful places, especially down here in the South Coast area.
My big-picture goal is to really just get this next generation invested and make them feel like they’re part of this landscape, this incredible area that we call home, and to really become stewards of where they live and to really have a vested interest in how to keep the things that we’re examining protected.
Just being able to appreciate and have their own relationship with the outdoors I think is the most valuable thing that anyone could take away from … finding Mobile Adventures and getting hands-on with the stuff that we’re trying to bring into the city.
Joanna McQuillan Weeks is a freelance writer and frequent correspondent for The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Trustees of Reservations stewards more than 120 sites across the state, from beaches and woodlands to museums, historic homes, and urban gardens. The South Coast region includes Allen C. Haskell Public Gardens in New Bedford; Copicut Woods, Fall River; Cornell Farm and Slocum’s River Reserve in Dartmouth; East Over Reservation in Rochester; East Over: Hales Brook & Sippican River, Marion; Lyman Reserve in Buzzards Bay; and Westport Town Farm.
For more information, visit https://thetrustees.org/program/trustees-mobile-adventurer/ and follow trustees_mobile adventures on Instagram for postings of upcoming events.
